academia – The Sociological Review

Blog

Epistemic Reflexivity and the Spotless Sociologist (Notes for Reinventing a Rounder Wheel)

By Mario Trifuoggi The industrialisation of academic publishing is one outcome of global educational expansion which criticism cannot pass over the wider discourse on the production of knowledge under capitalism. Whether the latter, especially in its current neoliberal fashion, is empowering or bridling intellectual freedom, it is a very complex matter with multiple aspects to […]

Blog

All Roll Over and None Fall Out

By Ansgar Allen The academy is beset by a survival ethos. Convinced of its value and importance, the university perpetuates itself before all else: accumulating reserves, wooing government and business, securing its market share. For its workforce mere compliance no longer suffices. Employees must remain outwardly positive, pushing themselves to exceed expectations, even as the […]

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Essays

On the Poverty of Student Choice

By Jamie Woodcock and Alberto Toscano After the previous White Paper, ‘Students at the Heart of the System’, which accompanied an increase of tuition fees to £9,000 a year, higher education is now faced with a new White Paper, whose title has a strangely 1990s ring to it: ‘Success as a Knowledge Economy’. When the […]

Podcasts

Roger Burrows on Metrics, Creativity and Scholarship

In this podcast recorded at the Accelerated Academy in December 2015, Roger Burrows discusses the metricisation of the academy and its implications for scholarship with our digital fellow Mark Carrigan. This is the first in a series of podcasts from the event which we’ll be publishing on our website. If you’d like to read more about these issues, […]

Blog

Early career planning and the management of the academic self in the neo-liberal university

By John Holmwood Recent changes to higher education in England have been dramatic, especially since the 2011 White Paper, Students at the Heart of the System. This proposed the withdrawal of direct public co-funding of undergraduate degrees in arts, humanities and social sciences and the replacement by student fees (temporarily capped at £9000) underwritten by a publicly […]

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Think Twice, It’s Alright: Reflections on Leaving Academia

By Meritxell Ramírez-i-Ollé I write this blog post moved by a mixture of feelings of rebellion, excitement and thankfulness. I rebel against the sense of urgency, determinism and short-sightedness that has pervaded my short postdoctoral life; I am excited about developing a more creative, unconventional and open-ended career as a sociologist; and I am extremely […]

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The Irrational Pace of Craft-Time

By Fabian Cannizzo The era of mass higher education is riddled with competing motivations, each shaping academic work and planning. For Blackmore and Kandiko, academic life is an intersection of enjoyment, monetary rewards, and ‘prestige economies’. Affect, capital, and status might be seen to draw the attention of intellectual labourers in different directions. Enjoyment may emerge […]

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Damned If You Do… Banal Gendered Exclusions in Academia, Babies and ‘Dinner with Other Candidates’

By Emma Jackson ‘The younger generation of academic women just don’t have children.’ I’m sat in the office of an older woman professor in an elite university. I’m here as part of a job interview. This institution has moved to a more American way of doing things and part of this is having individual meetings […]

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Event Reports

Academe/Action: Social Transformation Within and Beyond the Academy

By Rosemary Hancock In September of this year the Sociological Review held its inaugural event in Australia, a half-day ECR workshop on social transformation within and beyond the academy, and a public lecture on the same theme. As a student of social movements and grassroots politics the apparent disconnect between the on-the-ground, muddy-hands, embodied nature of […]

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Chronic Academics

Race and Disability in the Academy

By Moya Bailey I have, until recently, worked in disability studies as an accomplice, understanding myself as able-bodied and as someone who does not have physical impairments that impact my daily movement through the world. I have however been diagnosed with a chronic illness that is changing the way I understand myself and is surfacing much […]

Blog

Chronic Academics

On Good Days, I Am Excited

By Anna Ruddock I am beginning this on a bad day. Not the worst kind of bad day – I am, after all, typing, and therefore thinking, albeit slowly, sludgily. How to describe this? Each time I try, I express it differently. Today it is as though my brain is a cautious thing; a wounded […]

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Chronic Academics

Making Visible: Chronic Illness and the Academy

By Anna Ruddock Chronically ill academics are not invisible. We are everywhere: as students, teachers, and colleagues. And neither are our illnesses invisible. Not really. Not if you come to know us; if you learn what to look for, to listen for, to ask. Less visible, but insidious and disabling, is the ableism that ensures […]

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Event Reports

Writing Retreats as Sites of Resistance, Inclusivity, Self-Care and the Care of Others?

By Carli Ria Rowell Delighted to have been one of sixteen attending The Sociological Review’s writing retreat from a pool of over seventy submissions I arrived at Glasgow central station on the afternoon of September 14th feeling both grateful and excited for what was to come. As a final year doctoral student I have spent […]

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To Walk the World: Reflections on Not Attending the International Studies Association Convention

By Aya Nassar I initially wanted to write something to be read-out on my behalf, for a panel which I did not attend at the ISA annual convention (Baltimore, 22nd-25th of February 2017). I did not attend the conference because the Executive Order that came to be commonly known as the “travel ban” was issued less than […]

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Academic Celebrity and the Publishing Industry

By Peter Walsh In the first article of our special section on Superstar Professors, Peter Walsh argues that the brand value of celebrity academics has to be understood in terms of longer term trends in scholarly publishing. In March 2014, I discovered that Zygmunt Bauman – regarded by many as the world’s greatest sociologist – had written […]